Week of December 4th

The week was much calmer than the crisis atmosphere of the previous ten days or so.

On the economic side, the week started with the announcement of the details of the support plan for Ireland, which let some skeptic of its efficiency [*,*]. The worries of contagion were strong: Portugal, Italy, Spain, even France were named as endangered economies [*,*,*]. But in the middle of the week, the European Central Bank decided to keep its main interest rate at 1% and continue its programs to support banks [*,*,*]. In conjunction with bad indicators for the US economy, those news help to make the euro crisis completely disappear, the european currency get up against the dollar at its level of two weeks ago [*].

In the rest of the EU news, the week started with an unnoticed EU-Africa summit [*]. Wednesday was the ‘birthday’ of the coming into effect of the treaty of Lisbon [*,*,*]. Finally, the EU is present at the Cancun summit on climate change, where this year, no state leader are present, which should prevent the disappointment of last year’s summit in Copenhagen [*,*].